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Offering extremely candid comments from mainstream journalists, this report provides a snapshot of an industry [news media] caught between the pressure to deliver page views, the impulse to cover manipulators and “trolls,” and the disgust (expressed in interviewees’ own words) of accidentally propagating extremist ideology. After reviewing common methods of “information laundering” of radical and racist messages through the press, Phillips uses journalists’ own words to propose a set of editorial “better practices” intended to reduce manipulation and harm. As social and digital media are leveraged to reconfigure the information landscape, Phillips argues that this new domain requires journalists to take what they know about abuses of power and media manipulation in traditional information ecosystems; and apply and adapt that knowledge to networked actors, such as white nationalist networks online.

‘a) Acknowledge that the fascist threat has changed. It’s political operations are far more nebulous and diffuse; it works in political institutions and dark corners of the internet; it will adopt and distort liberal tropes and talking points. b) Deal with the fact that traditional forms of policing will be of little effectiveness in countering it. Those with the most power to inhibit the dissemination of far-right and racist ideology are the digital platforms they rely on: reddit, Twitch, YouTube, Twitter, Facebook. c) Transform current affairs media. For too long, producers and editors have taken the alt-right at their word, and framed issues as free speech/limits of offensive humour. That must change. Unless you’re willing to do rigorous research first, don’t commission the debate. d) Overhaul the teaching of PSHE & Citizenship in education to prepare young people for the desensitising and extreme content they will see online. Create space for healthy debate and discussion in respectful environments. Don’t let groomers take advantage of their curiousity. e) Get a very big bin, and put Melanie Phillips, Rod Liddle, and Douglas Murray in it. Then fire the bin into outer space.’

wow, TIL. ‘The ancient Egyptians, it’s important to note, ascribed important powers to images of the human form. They believed that the essence of a deity could inhabit an image of that deity, or, in the case of mere mortals, part of that deceased human being’s soul could inhabit a statue inscribed for that particular person. These campaigns of vandalism were therefore intended to “deactivate an image’s strength,” as Bleiberg put it.’

Some of the most common questions our clients ask about procuring open source software.

The business world is competitive by nature. An organization’s intellectual property and the custom software that costs valuable time and money to develop is an incredibly prized possession - one that’s important to protect. That’s why the idea of procuring an open source solution (free software that can be used by anyone) can be such a foreign and challenging concept for many in the business world.

In this article, we’ll walk through some of the most common questions that clients have about procuring open source software, so that you’ll understand how this software is licensed, what you can and can't do with it, and hopefully help you make an informed decision about procuring and extending open source software services.

How does open source licensing work, exactly?

Open source software turns the traditional software licensing model on its head by allowing users to modify and freely redistribute software. Open source is defined by criteria intended to promote and protect software freedom, and support the communities which contribute to the success of open source projects.

Are there any laws that prevent someone from making changes to the software and repackaging the entire thing for sale?

Many open source projects are able to survive and thrive because there are protections in place that prevent someone from turning the project into something proprietary. Drupal and many other open source projects are covered under the GNU Public License or GPL, one of the most common open source licenses. The GPL prevents anyone from distributing the software that it covers without also sharing its source code. This ensures that the project covered by the GPL remains open source.

Does this mean that if I pay a contractor for custom code to be developed that adds to an existing GPL-covered open source project, I’ll be required to release that work to the public for free?

The short answer is simply “no”. If you work on or pay for someone to work on custom code that modifies a GPL-covered open source project, you won’t be required to give that work away to the community at large.

The GPL only requires that you release your source code if you plan to sell or release (“distribute”) your custom code. If you’re just planning to use the code internally, or as part of a hosted solution that you control, there’s no need to share it with the world.

But shouldn’t I share the code? Isn’t that how open source works?

Many users of open source software do decide to share their source code with the world through contributions to the open source project in question, such as a contributed module in Drupal. There is no requirement to do this, but there are some advantages.

Source code is the actual text document that a software developer creates. It’s uncompiled, meaning that it’s written in programming language that can be read and edited by a human. The reason that distinction is important here is that source code is raw and can be inspected and modified. This practice helps improve both the security and the usability of the software.

By sharing your source code, other people may decide to improve on it and fix it for free, because it’s mutually beneficial. It’s much harder to staff a team of internal developers to keep your code tested, maintained, and bug-free while planning an improvement roadmap to add new features and create new software integrations. Having others work on your code means it is made better both for you and for them. Sometimes the advantage of having software that works really well and has updates and features added more quickly outweighs the advantage of keeping your innovation secret from your competitors.

Join Palantir's CEO, Tiffany Farriss, for the keynote at this year's DrupalCorn Camp. With tech still struggling to achieve its diversity and inclusion goals and average job tenure down to less than 3 years, we need to transform how we think about our organizational cultures.

How do we create environments that succeed because of the teams, but where that success is not dependent on any one person? How do we align the company and individual interests so that everyone benefits from however much time that they work together? This presentation explores the role that culture and learning have for organizations and individuals as they work to answering those questions.

With the announcement that the Google Search Appliance was End of Life, many universities started looking around for replacement options. At Palantir, we wanted to provide an open source option that could solve the following needs:

A simple way to store, retrieve, and parse content.

A cross-platform search application.

A speedy, usable, responsive front-end.

A flexible, extensible, reusable model.

A drop-in replacement for deprecated Google Products

Working with the University of Michigan, we architected and developed a solution. Join Ken Rickard to learn more about Federated Search and to see a live demo.

Introducing myself My name is Romain, I have been nominated to the status of Debian Maintainer recently. I am part of the debian-kernel team (still a padawan) since few months, and, as a DM, I will co-maintain the package raspi3-firmware with Gunnar Wolf.

Current contributionsAs a kernel and linux en enginner, I focus on embedded stuffs and kernel development. This is a summary of what I have done in the previous months. Kernel teamAs a contributor, I work a various things, I try to work where help is the more needed. I have wrote a python script for generating debian changelog in firmware-nonfree, I have bumped the package for new releases. I bump the linux kernel for new upstream releases, I help to close and resolve bugs, I backport new features when it makes sense for doing so, enable new hardware and recently I have added new flavour for the RPI 1 and RPI Zero in armel ! (spoil)Raspi3-firmwareI have recently added a new mode in the configuration file of the package that let you device what you would like to boot from the firmware. You can either boot a linux kernel directly, passing the adress of the initramfs to use, a baremetal application, or a second level bootloader like u-boot or barebox (personnally I prefer u-boot). From u-boot then, you can use extlinux and get a nice generated menu by uboot menu. I have also added the support for using the devicetree-blob of the RPI 1 and the RPI Zero W when the firmware boots the kernel directly. I am also participating for reducing lintian warnings, new upstream release and improvements in general.U-BootI have recently sent a MR for enabling support for the RPI Zero W in uboot for armel and it was accepted (thanks to Vagrant). As I use U-Boot everyday on my boards, I will probably send others MR ;) Raspberry Pi ZeroAs written described above, I have added a flavour for enabling support for the RPI1 and RPI Zero in armel for Linux 4.19.x. Like the Raspberry PI 3, there are no official images for this, but you can use debos or vmdb2 for building a buster image for your PI Zero. I have personally tried it, at home. I was able to run an LXDE session, with llvmpipe (I am still investigating if vc4 in gallium works for this SoC or not, while it's working perfectly fine for the PI3, it fallback to llvmpipe on the PI Zero).Raspberry Pi 3As posted on planet recently by Gunnar, you can find an unofficial image for the PI 3 if you want to try it. On buster you will be able to run a kernel 4.19.x LTS with an excellent DRM/KMS support and Gallium support in mesa. I was able to run a LXDE session with VC4 gallium here !Future workI will try my best to get an excellent support for all Raspberry PI in Debian (with unofficial images at the beginning). Including kernel support, kernel bugs fixes or improvements, debos and/or vmdb2 recipes for generating buster images easily, and even graphical stack hacks :) . I will continue my work in the kernel-team, because there are a tons of things to do, and of courses as co-maintainer, maintain raspi3-firmware (that will be probably renamed to something more generic, *spoil*).

A lot of effort goes into engaging your visitors to ‘Sign-up’ or ‘Contact’ you. You send them a warm and fuzzy invitation to complete the form, tell them all the great reasons why they should complete the form… but who likes to complete a form? Guarantee a smooth sign-up process and increase the completion rate of your webforms with these six tips.

#1 Make it Flow

Before you begin designing that web form, it is always good to create a User Flowchart. Working to establish the form completion process from start to finish, a flowchart will help you:

Determine what information is needed (and when)

Decide what actions and interactions are appropriate

Determine the order of actions

Make considerations for new patterns to aid the completion process

A User Flowchart can begin with a simple Flow Outline, which can then be placed in a flowchart diagram and later illustrated using low fidelity paper prototypes to find the most natural set of actions. When creating the outline consider the following:

The Business Objective

What is the main objective of the website for achieving successful completion of the form? (ie, we want to gather as many email addresses as possible.)

What is the required information needed from the person completing the form? (ie, we need their name and email, and since our site is only for adults we also need their birth date.)

The User Persona

Take advantage of the information gained from the User Personas to focus on the user’s various needs and considerations. What problem do they want to solve and how can this form help them?

What devices do they access most frequently to complete webforms? It’s good to know in advance if most of the users complete forms on their mobile phones and/or if they have inferior internet connectivity.

The Entry Point

When designing a User Flowchart, keep in mind the point of entry. Perhaps they arrive after clicking the Call to Action on the homepage. Often webforms are a part of an email or social media campaign, or the user arrives at the form after an organic search. The users should be treated differently based on where they come from, and may need extra context to reiterate the goal of the form to help them get orientated when they arrive. Consider all possibilities.

#2 Keep it Short and Sweet

Don’t ask for information that’s not needed. Your subscription or contact form — or any form that gathers basic information — should only ask for the bare necessities needed in order to accomplish that goal. People will usually stick around long enough to enter their name, email address and password. Anything more than that should be the absolute minimum amount of information needed, with further data obtained in follow-up communications or by implementing a multi-step form (see tip #3). No one enjoys completing a form, so keep it as simple as possible! Neil Patel found that three form fields was the optimal number. Pegasystems, a Mediacurrent client, leveraged third-party integrations on their Drupal 8 site to pre-fill form fields with data and improved the user experience for returning visitors.

Reducing the number of form fields can increase conversion rates by 26 percent.

Email Address

Forward thinking email form fields provide suggestions for fixes when the email address has been entered incorrectly. … Did you mean @gmail.com?

If you include an auto fix for mistyped email addresses you won’t need to require the user to enter it twice. Otherwise, it’s is a good approach to provide the extra guarantee that they’ve got it right.

When the form is for creating an account or signing up for a newsletter, a current practice is to use the email address for the account instead of providing a separate username. This will cause less frustration with creating one that is not already in use, as well as remembering it every time they login.

Name

The person’s name is really only needed in instances where account personalization or custom communication is used. A frequent approach is to provide one field for their full name. This is a bonus since some users may have more than two words that make up their full name, and one field takes less time to complete (especially on mobile devices). Check first to see if the system requires the first name to be isolated for marketing purposes.

Password

Enough with the 'confirm password' already! They will lower your conversion rates. Give the user the option to actually SEE the password they’re entering with a ‘show password’ toggle, and they won’t have to enter it twice.

Include a Password Strength Indicator. You can get creative with messaging to encourage users to try harder when creating a more secure password like Geeklist does: “Crack Time: 5 minutes”

Depending on the level of site security, another time-saving feature is the ability to never have to enter their password again with the ‘Remember Me’ feature.

#3 Multi-step Forms

Single step forms are the most common type of form found on a website. Sometimes, however, using the minimum amount of fields will not accomplish the goal of capturing essential user data. Instead of simply adding more fields to your one-page form you should be aware of an important point:

Multi-step forms have been found to increase conversions by as much as 300% (without increasing website traffic).

Multi-step forms convert well for several reasons:

Simplicity

Through the use of progressive disclosure design techniques, we can improve usability when only the minimum data required for a task is presented to the user. Multi-step forms provide the ability to break up a longer form into manageable steps so the user is not visually overwhelmed with requirements at the beginning or during the process. By including only one or two questions per step with a manageable number of steps overall will improve the user experience and significantly increase the chance they will complete it.

Reduced Psychological Friction

Multi-steps with a simplified interface allow opportunity to use low-friction language in order to reduce psychological friction. In order to encourage the user to become immersed with an energized focus on the activity, we must always seek to minimize disruptions and use language that puts them in a positive state of mind.

Orientation

Progress bars encourage form completion. The most common use of visual progress trackers are when conducting an online purchase since those are often broken into a multiple step process. It answers the questions the user may have during completion:

How long will the form take?

What comes next?

Is anything happening?

Displaying the steps required to complete the form along with where the user currently is at in the process will help manage their expectations and keep them oriented throughout.

Investment

By using the approach of requesting general information at the beginning of the form and moving towards more sensitive information requests towards the end of the form, the user feels more invested and is therefore more likely to complete.

Conditional Logic

Longer forms will sometimes benefit by using conditional logic in order to personalize the experience. The user is provided with specific questions based on certain responses therefore eliminating irrelevant information retrieval while simultaneously obtaining more targeted data. Save them valuable time and customize their experience, and they will likely reward you by clicking the submit button.

#4 Make it Easy to Read

Including the labels and inputs, consider the context being used for all text on the page and work to ensure your font sizes are large enough to be legible on all devices. The amount of content on the page should be considered while also using best practices for accessibility.

Recent trends are a 14px font size at minimum.

When specifying a 16px font size for mobile devices, iOS will not zoom in when the user taps the field, because it’s not needed. This approach can be less distracting especially when there are multiple form fields on the page.

Consider the maximum amount of characters that will be needed in all cases to ensure enough room is provided to complete each field. For example, some zip codes in other countries use a varying number of digits.

#5 Inform Everything

Label All Things

The label of the form field you want the user to complete should ALWAYS remain visible. The labels can be placed outside of the field near the top, right, or left — or even better — use the Infield Top Aligned Label. This popular approach has been found to be the quickest to scan, has the best flow, and takes up less real estate. The labels are placed inside of the field, jumping to the top left corner as the user begins typing. Either way, at no point should the user lose sight of the information that’s needed inside of the field.

Inline Form Validation

Inform the user as they progress if anything has been entered incorrectly or if a field is missing information. Don’t make them click the ‘Submit’ button at the end of the form only to receive a bunch of red text telling them what they have to re-do.

Micro interactions such as a simple green check or a red ‘X’ along with a brief message as the user completes the form will improve the workflow.

Tell them if their CAPS LOCK IS ON.

Required or Optional?

Inform the user which fields are required and which are optional for the form to be accepted. An asterisk is often used to designate required information, but they are ignored by screen readers so make sure the required fields include the HTML5 ‘required’ attribute or the aria-required set to true.

Field Details

Explaining the information needed for each field is another great approach. If your Registration Sign-up Form will require a password with at least 6 unique characters with 2 of them numbers, tell them! Does the phone number field require a +, or a country code, or an area code? Tell them or show them.

Progress Bar

A form that’s broken into logical steps is easier to complete. If there are multiple steps that require multiple screens to complete, add a progress bar so the user knows where they are in the process.

If possible, add a link to the completed steps in the progress bar so the user can go back if needed.

Safety

Make your users feel safe during sign-up by informing them about your terms, policies, or rules.

Ensure them you will not share their information or spam their email.

Provide an easy way to cancel or opt out at any time, without much effort.

#6 Must be Mobile

While optimizing your site for mobile devices, any forms on your site should also be carefully considered. Not only are the screens smaller, but often the connections are slower, and entering text can be a bit tricky, so reducing the number of required fields is especially important. Luckily, recent innovation for mobile forms have provided modern solutions and compression techniques that could actually encourage sign-up on a mobile device:

The Free Software Movement campaigns for computer users'
freedom to cooperate and control their own computing. The Free
Software Movement developed the GNU operating system, typically used
together with the kernel Linux, specifically to make these freedoms
possible.

Richard Stallman's speech will be nontechnical, admission is
gratis, and the public is encouraged to attend.

I remember clearly the moment I’d had enough of NPR for the day. It was early morning January 25 of this year, still pretty dark outside. An NPR anchor was interviewing an NPR reporter — they seem to do that a lot these days — and asked the following simple but important question:

“So
if we know that Roger Stone was in communications with WikiLeaks and we
know U.S. intelligence agencies have said WikiLeaks was operating at
the behest of Russia, does that mean that Roger Stone has been now
connected directly to Russia’s efforts to interfere in the U.S.
election?”

The
factual answer, based on both data and logic, would have been “yes”.
NPR, in fact, had spent much airtime covering this; for instance, a June 2018 story goes into detail about Stone’s interactions with WikiLeaks, and less than a week before Stone’s arrest, NPR referred to “internal emails stolen by Russian hackers and posted to Wikileaks.” In November of 2018, The Atlantic wrote,
“Russia used WikiLeaks as a conduit — witting or unwitting — and
WikiLeaks, in turn, appears to have been in touch with Trump allies.”

Why,
then, did the NPR reporter begin her answer with “well,” proceed to
hedge, repeat denials from Stone and WikiLeaks, and then wind up saying
“authorities seem to have some evidence” without directly answering the
question? And what does this mean for bias in the media?

Let
us begin with a simple principle: facts do not have a political bias.
Telling me that “the sky is blue” no more reflects a Democratic bias
than saying “3+3=6” reflects a Republican bias. In an ideal world,
politics would shape themselves around facts; ideas most in agreement
with the data would win. There are not two equally-legitimate sides to
questions of fact. There is no credible argument against “the earth is
round”, “climate change is real,” or “Donald Trump is an unindicted
co-conspirator in crimes for which jail sentences have been given.”
These are factual, not political, statements. If you feel, as I do, a
bit of a quickening pulse and escalating tension as you read through
these examples, then you too have felt the forces that wish you to be
uncomfortable with unarguable reality.

That
we perceive some factual questions as political is a sign of a deep
dysfunction in our society. It’s a sign that our policies are not always
guided by fact, but that a sustained effort exists to cause our facts
to be guided by policy.

Facts
do not have a political bias. There are not two equally-legitimate
sides to questions of fact. “Climate change is real” is a factual, not a
political, statement. Our policies are not always guided by fact; a
sustained effort exists to cause our facts to be guided by policy.

Why
did I say right-wing bias, then? Because at this particular moment in
time, it is the political right that is more engaged in the effort to
shape facts to policy. Whether it is denying the obvious lies of the
President, the clear consensus on climate change, or the contours of
various investigations, it is clear that they desire to confuse and
mislead in order to shape facts to their whim.

It’s
not always so consequential when the media gets it wrong. When CNN
breathlessly highlights its developing story — that an airplane “will
struggle to maintain altitude once the fuel tanks are empty” —it gives
us room to critique the utility of 24/7 media, but not necessarily a
political angle.

But
ask yourself: who benefits when the media is afraid to report a simple
fact about an investigation with political connotations? The obvious
answer, in the NPR example I gave, is that Republicans benefit. They
want the President to appear innocent, so every hedge on known facts
about illegal activities of those in Trump’s orbit is a gift to the
right. Every time a reporter gives equal time to climate change deniers
is a gift to the right and a blow to informed discussion in a democracy.

Not only is there a rightward bias, but there is also an establishment bias that goes hand-in-hand. Consider this CNN report
about Facebook’s “pivot to privacy”, in which CEO Zuckerberg is
credited with “changing his tune somewhat”. To the extent to which that
article highlights “problems” with this, they take Zuckerberg at
face-value and start to wonder if it will be harder to clamp down on
fake news in the news feed if there’s more privacy. That is a total
misunderstanding of what was being proposed; a more careful reading of
the situation was done by numerous outlets, resulting in headlines such
as this one in The Intercept: “Mark Zuckerberg Is Trying to Play You — Again.”
They correctly point out the only change actually mentioned pertained
only to instant messages, not to the news feed that CNN was talking
about, and even that had a vague promise to happen “over the next few
years.” Who benefited from CNN’s failure to read a press release
closely? The established powers — Facebook.

Pay
attention to the media and you’ll notice that journalists trip all over
themselves to report a new dot in a story, but they run away scared
from being the first to connect the dots. Much has been written about
the “media narrative,” often critical, with good reason. Back in
November of 2018, an excellent article on “The Ubearable Rightness of Seth Abramson” covered one particular case in delightful detail.

Journalists
trip all over themselves to report a new dot in a story, but they run
away scared from being the first to connect the dots.

Seth Abramson himself wrote,
“Trump-Russia is too complex to report. We need a new kind of
journalism.” He argues the culprit is not laziness, but rather that
“archive of prior relevant reporting that any reporter could review
before they publish their own research is now so large and far-flung
that more and more articles are frustratingly incomplete or even
accidentally erroneous than was the case when there were fewer media
outlets, a smaller and more readily navigable archive of past reporting
for reporters to sift through, and a less internationalized media
landscape.” Whether laziness or not, the effect is the same: a failure
to properly contextualize facts leading to misrepresented or outright
wrong outcomes that, at present, have a distinct bias towards right-wing
and establishment interests.

Yes,
the many scandals in Trumpland are extraordinarily complex, and in this
age of shrinking newsroom budgets, it’s no wonder that reporters have
trouble keeping up. Highly-paid executives like Zuckerberg and
politicians in Congress have years of practice with obfuscation, and it
takes skill to find the truth (if there even is any) behind a corporate
press release or political talking point. One would hope, though, that
reporters would be less quick to opine if they lack those skills or the
necessary time to dig in.

There’s
not just laziness; there’s also, no doubt, a confusion about what it
means to be a balanced journalist. It is clear that there are two sides
to a debate over, say, whether to give a state’s lottery money to the
elementary schools or the universities. When there is the appearance of a
political debate over facts, shouldn’t that also receive equal time for
each side? I argue no. In fact, politicians making claims that
contradict establish fact should be exposed by journalists, not covered by them.

And
some of it is, no doubt, fear. Fear that if they come out and say “yes,
this implicates Stone with Russian hacking” that the Fox News crowd
will attack them as biased. Of course this will happen, but that attack
will be wrong. The right has
done an excellent job of convincing both reporters and the public that
there’s a big left-leaning bias that needs to be corrected, by yelling
about it every time a fact is mentioned that they don’t like. The
unfortunate result is that the fact-leaning bias in the media is being whittled away.

Politicians
making claims that contradict establish fact should be exposed by
journalists, not covered by them. The fact-leaning bias in the media is
being whittled away.

Regardless
of the cause, media organizations and their reporters need to be
cognizant of the biases actors of all stripes wish them to display, and
refuse to play along. They need to be cognizant of the demands they put
on their own reporters, and give them space to understand the context of
a story before explaining it. They need to stand up to those that try
to diminish facts, to those that would like them to be uninformed.

A
world in which reporters know the context of their stories and boldly
state facts as facts, come what may, is a world in which reporters
strengthen the earth’s democracies. And, by extension, its people.

There’s not much that’s reasonable to say about the horrific news from Christchurch today. The actions of the gunman, a self-proclaimed fascist, being amplified and repeated by so many others online…

I just can’t…

I’ve been stuck most of the day. Stuck in thoughts that don’t go anywhere, at least not anywhere good.

The last few years, the worst side of humanity has been winning in a big way, and while there’s nothing new about white supremacy, fascism, violence, or hate, we’re seeing how those old human reflexes have adapted to the tools that we’ve built in and for our online world.

This is something I posted on python-ideas, but I think it's interesting to a wider audience.

There's been a lot of discussion recently about an operator to merge two dicts.

It prompted me to think about the reason (some) people like operators, and a discussion I had with my mentor Lambert Meertens over 30 years ago came to mind.

For mathematicians, operators are essential to how they think. Take a simple operation like adding two numbers, and try exploring some of its behavior.

add(x, y) == add(y, x) (1)

Equation (1) expresses the law that addition is commutative. It's usually written using an operator, which makes it more concise:

x + y == y + x (1a)

That feels like a minor gain.

Now consider the associative law:

add(x, add(y, z)) == add(add(x, y), z) (2)

Equation (2) can be rewritten using operators:

x + (y + z) == (x + y) + z (2a)

This is much less confusing than (2), and leads to the observation that the parentheses are redundant, so now we can write

x + y + z (3)

without ambiguity (it doesn't matter whether the + operator binds tighter to the left or to the right).

Many other laws are also written more easily using operators. Here's one more example, about the identity element of addition:

add(x, 0) == add(0, x) == x (4)

compare to

x + 0 == 0 + x == x (4a)

The general idea here is that once you've learned this simple notation, equations written using them are easier to *manipulate* than equations written using functional notation -- it is as if our brains grasp the operators using different brain machinery, and this is more efficient.

I think that the fact that formulas written using operators are more easily processed *visually* has something to do with it: they engage the brain's visual processing machinery, which operates largely subconsciously, and tells the conscious part what it sees (e.g. "chair" rather than "pieces of wood joined together"). The functional notation must take a different path through our brain, which is less subconscious (it's related to reading and understanding what you read, which is learned/trained at a much later age than visual processing).

The power of visual processing really becomes apparent when you combine multiple operators. For example, consider the distributive law:

mul(n, add(x, y)) == add(mul(n, x), mul(n, y)) (5)

That was painful to write, and I believe that at first you won't see the pattern (or at least you wouldn't have immediately seen it if I hadn't mentioned this was the distributive law).

Compare to:

n * (x + y) == n * x + n * y (5a)

Notice how this also uses relative operator priorities. Often mathematicians write this even more compact:

n(x+y) == nx + ny (5b)

but alas, that currently goes beyond the capacities of Python's parser.

Another very powerful aspect of operator notation is that it is convenient to apply them to objects of different types. For example, laws (1) through (5) also work when x, y and z are same-size vectors and n is a scalar (substituting a vector of zeros for the literal "0"), and also if they are matrices (again, n has to be a scalar).

And you can do this with objects in many different domains. For example, the above laws (1) through (5) apply to functions too (n being a scalar again).

By choosing the operators wisely, mathematicians can employ their visual brain to help them do math better: they'll discover new interesting laws sooner because sometimes the symbols on the blackboard just jump at you and suggest a path to an elusive proof.

Now, programming isn't exactly the same activity as math, but we all know that Readability Counts, and this is where operator overloading in Python comes in. Once you've internalized the simple properties which operators tend to have, using + for string or list concatenation becomes more readable than a pure OO notation, and (2) and (3) above explain (in part) why that is.

Of course, it's definitely possible to overdo this -- then you get Perl. But I think that the folks who point out "there is already a way to do this" are missing the point that it really is easier to grasp the meaning of this:

and it is not just a matter of fewer lines of code: the first form allows us to use our visual processing to help us see the meaning quicker -- and without distracting other parts of our brain (which might already be occupied by keeping track of the meaning of d1 and d2, for example).

Of course, everything comes at a price. You have to learn the operators, and you have to learn their properties when applied to different object types. (This is true in math too -- for numbers, x*y == y*x, but this property does not apply to functions or matrices; OTOH x+y == y+x applies to all, as does the associative law.)

"But what about performance?" I hear you ask. Good question. IMO, readability comes first, performance second. And in the basic example (d = d1 + d2) there is no performance loss compared to the two-line version using update, and a clear win in readability. I can think of many situations where performance difference is irrelevant but readability is of utmost importance, and for me this is the default assumption (even at Dropbox -- our most performance critical code has already been rewritten in ugly Python or in Go). For the few cases where performance concerns are paramount, it's easy to transform the operator version to something else -- *once you've confirmed it's needed* (probably by profiling).

If I look back now, it must be more than 20 years since I got fascinated with GNU/Linux ecosystem and started using it.

Back then, it was more curiosity of a young teenager and the excitement to learn something. There’s one thing that I have always admired/respected about Free Software’s values, is: Access for everyone to learn. This is something I never forget and still try to do my bit.

It was perfect timing and I was lucky to be part of it. Free Software was (and still is) a great platform to learn upon, if you have the willingness and desire for it.

Over the years, a lot lot lot has changed, evolved and improved. From the days of writing down the XF86Config configuration file to get the X server running, to a new world where now everything is almost dynamic, is a great milestone that we have achieved.

All through these years, I always used GNU/Linux platform as my primary computing platform. The CLI, Shell and Tools, have all been a great source of learning. Most of the stuff was (and to an extent, still is) standardized and focus was usually on a single project.

There was less competition on that front, rather there was more collaboration. For example, standard tools like: sed, awk, grep etc were single tools. Like you didn’t have 2 variants of it. So, enhancements to these tools was timely and consistent and learning these tools was an incremental task.

On the other hand, on the Desktop side of things, it started and stood for a very long time, to do things their own ways. But eventually, quite a lot of those things have standardized, thankfully.

For the larger part of my desktop usage, I have mostly been a KDE user. I have used other environments like IceWM, Enlightenment briefly but always felt the need to fallback to KDE, as it provided a full and uniform solution. For quite some time, I was more of a user preferring to only use the K* tools, as in if it wasn’t written with kdelibs, I’d try to avoid it. But, In the last 5 years, I took at detour and tried to unlearn and re-learn the other major desktop environment, GNOME.

GNOME is an equally beautiful and elegant desktop environment with a minimalistic user interface (but which at many times ends up plaguing its application’s feature set too, making it “minimalistic feature set applications”). I realized that quite a lot of time and money is invested into the GNOME project, especially by the leading Linux Distribution Vendors.

But the fact is that GNU/Linux is still not a major player on the Desktop market. Some believe that the Desktop Market itself has faded and been replaced by the Mobile market. I think Desktop Computing still has a critical place in the near foreseeable future and the Mobile Platform is more of an extension shell to it. For example, for quickies, the Mobile platform is perfect. But for a substantial amount of work to be done, we still fallback to using our workstations. Mobile platform is good for a quick chat or email, but if you need to write a review report or a blog post or prepare a presentation or update an excel sheet, you’d still prefer to use your workstation.

So…. After using GNOME platform for a couple of years, I realized that there’s a lot of work and thought put into this platform too, just like the KDE platform. BUT To really be able to dream about the “Year of the dominance of the GNU/Linux desktop platform”, all these projects need to work together and synergise their efforts.

Pain points:

Multiple tools, multiple efforts wasted. Could be synergised.

Data accessiblity

Integration and uniformity

Multiple tools

Kmail used to be an awesome email client. Evoltuion today is an awesome email client. Thunderbird was an awesome email client, which from what I last remember, Mozilla had lack of funds to continue maintaining it. And then there’s the never ending stream of new/old projects that come and go. Thankfully, email is pretty standardized in its data format. Otherwise, it would be a nightmare to switch between these client. But still, GNU/Linux platforms have the potential to provide a strong and viable offering if they could synergise their work together. Today, a lot of resource is just wasted and nobody wins. Definitely not the GNU/Linux platform. Who wins are: GMail, Hotmail etc.

If you even look at the browser side of things, Google realized the potential of the Web platform for its business. So they do have a Web client for GNU/Linux. But you’ll never see an equivalent for Email/PIM. Not because it is obsolete. But more because it would hurt their business instead.

Data accessibility

My biggest gripe is data accessiblity. Thankfully, for most of the stuff that we rely upon (email, documents etc), things are standardized. But there still are annoyances. For example, when KDE 4.x debacle occured, kwallet could not export its password database to the newer one. When I moved to GNOME, I had another very very very hard time extracting passwords from kwallet and feeding them to SeaHorse. Then, when recently, I switched back to KDE, I had to similarly struggle exporting back my data from SeaHorse (no, not back to KWallet). Over the years, I realized that critical data should be kept in its simplest format. And let the front-ends do all the bling they want to. I realized this more with Emails. Maildir is a good clean format to store my email in, irrespective of how I access my email. Whether it is dovecot, Evolution, Akonadi, Kmail etc, I still have my bare data intact.

I had burnt myself on the password front quite a bit, so on this migration back to KDE, I wanted an email like solution. So there’s pass, a password store, which fits the bill just like the Email use case. It would make a lot more sense for all Desktop Password Managers to instead just be a frontend interface to pass and let it keep the crucial data in bare minimal format, and accessbile at all times, irrespective of the overhauling that the Desktop projects tend to do every couple of years or so.

Data is critical. Without retaining its compatibility (both backwards and forward), no battle can you win.

I honestly feel the Linux Desktop Architects from the different projects should sit together and agree on a set of interfaces/tools (yes yes there is fd.o) and stick to it. Too much time and energy is wasted otherwise.

Integration and Uniformity

This is something I have always desired and I was quite impressed (and delighted) to see some progress on the KDE desktop in the UI department. On GNOME, I developed a liking for the Evolution email client. Infact, it is my client currently, for Email, NNTP and other PIM. And I still get to use it nicely in a KDE environment. Thank you.

Adam stood in the middle of the garden, enveloped in exquisite beauty. The world was there to delight him, succulent fruit, dignified trees, green meadows, sprinkling pool and species of all kinds. Yet he stood contemplating the nature, he felt certain loneliness and thus the Lord said

It is not good that man is alone. I shall make him a compatible helper.

With the creation of other species, both male and female sprang up the same time. If the beginning of the entire universe was chosen to be this way, how can business be any good without clients and a strong relationship with them, Right?

The productivity and enduring relationship not only provides value to clients that are consistent but also constructs a healthy connection in every business venture.

Though there are times when you get stuck in a rut with clients and the relationship starts to rot.

So, how do you change it?

Maybe with some strategies or maybe with the help of some plan. Well, whatever it may be here are some of the approaches which you can adapt to sweet up that sour relationship and add more productivity to a particular project.

But how can perfect client relationship get ruined?

Under perfect circumstances, organizations and big enterprises treat their clients right. However, there might be times when they are under pressure to sell more or retain those paying customers, chances are that they might deviate from their standards. Resulting in sorrowful client satisfaction.

With this context here are some of the actions which can kill a perfect build client relationship:

Saying yes to a client when you should not

There is no shame in accepting the fact that your organization can meet only a level of expectations and not beyond it. Taking up those clients who are not a good match is foolishness. If a particular organization knows that they going to hate dealing with a client or they might fail to meet their quality standards, the money is not worth the inevitable breakdown.

Overpromising

When there is a wide gap between expectations and reality - it results in disappointment. If you are selling software or a product for that matter, don’t promise the integration which will take a week or so and won’t work perfectly. Give those commitments that you know are humanly and technically feasible. Overpromising results in fears.

Not addressing the key details

When you are serving a client, it is necessary to include each and every detail about the project. You leaving details out by omission is one thing. If you leave out details intentionally, you will screw up relationships. Thus, address to each and every key detail.

Being unauthentic

If you are focusing only on yourself, what works for you and whatever you do then spending your time considering what's best for your team, company, or business partnership is a waste. Adopt an all-or-nothing attitude, acting however is needed to win favor, seal a deal, or make a sale, even if it means lying or misrepresenting your position is a call for a sour relationship.

Taking These Few Important Steps for an Enduring Relationship

We all know that a huge amount of time and effort is employed on acquiring clients, yet very few businesses spend the same energy nurturing the relationship. Here are some of the tips that would help you endure your client relationship.

Communication is the key

Clients depend on you to keep them informed. Having constant communication with them should be the top priorities. This includes updating them on various projects, as well as making them understand about any kind of bumps that you may encounter in the product delivering journey.

Information distribution

Don’t delay to share knowledge that might be useful to the clients, whether or not it benefits your organization in a way. The more value you present, the more a client attains to depend on you. There should not be a hesitation to share important and crucial data.

Integrity

If you are not honest to your client and vice-versa, no long term relationship survives. In addition to producing a product or service, your client requires you to show a chief responsibility towards all the dealings. Nowadays clients are really intelligent, they understand when they are being deceived or misled. Speaking a “ white lie” about why you failed can ruin your reputation. And without a reputation in terms of integrity, you can fail to cultivate the kind of long-term relationships that your business stands on.

Encourage multi-player team involvement

The success of any project depends on the contribution of every member of the team. Encouraging multi-player team with the involvement of the dev team can bring laurels to your project. This way the team members have a sense of ownership in a group project and they believe that their contributions are valued. They feel motivated to share their best work.

Goals

There might be times when you would feel that you and your client are not on the same page. You have your own objective and your client has there's. The solution to this common issue is to set mutual goals.

And as soon as you start your new project and get engaged and committed to the deadlines, you help the client with vital product or services that might not be available in time to meet his or her needs. Set mutual goals from the very beginning to avoid any kind of friction later in the future.

Work for a strong partnership

If you are building a relationship in all the appropriate ways and of course providing the products and services to your client needs, you can operate on developing a partnership with the client, something that is ahead of the project development.

A client who determines that the organization that is serving them is in it for the long haul and that it motivates to help them succeed soon starts to view them as more than just a vendor or supplier. You become a partner in their enterprise and someone they grow to value today, tomorrow and in the years to come

Looking into the performance

Re-examine the cost

If you have been working with a particular customer for a long time, re-examine what it really costs you to do so. It would not be feasible to cut your price if it becomes cheaper to serve them.

Perceiving the Product

Instead of thinking about what it is or what it does, you should infuse how it makes them feel. Even if you sell software, your software may relieve the stressful feeling of trying to get work done in a limited amount of time. It may make them feel confident in doing the job right.

Modify the strategy of budget

Modify what you sell from a capital cost into an expense if your customer’s CEO won’t approve your product. Often, capital spending is prohibited but monthly expenses continue to be budgeted.

Finding an efficient distributor

Sell your wares through a distributor if customers start to need smaller quantities or more service. Perhaps your service has declined as you pursued larger customers. If so, get a third party to sell and service your customer properly. You sure don’t need to make as much if you are doing less.

Selling your Service

If they won’t buy your service by the unit, sell it by the hour or the result. So many times buyers are told to cut costs by cutting inventory.

Grant with a warranty if your product is at fault

If your product or service was deficient, offer some kind of insurance to assure your customer it won’t be a problem next time.

Managing the departments

The reasons customers buy your from you can change over time. A purchasing department can make decisions until its company has legal or customer problems, at which time their finance or marketing departments may now have the final say.

Managing projects with the help of various methods

Waterfall: One of the more traditional project management methodologies, Waterfall is a linear, sequential design approach where progress flows downwards in one direction like a waterfall.

Agile development: Agile is best suited for projects that are iterative and incremental. It’s a type of process where demands and solutions evolve through the collaborative effort of self-organizing and cross-functional teams and their customers

Scrum: Scrum is comprised of five values: commitment, courage, focus, openness, and respect. Its goal is to develop, deliver, and sustain complex products through collaboration, accountability, and iterative progress.

Kanban: Kanban is another popular Agile framework that, similar to Scrum, focuses on early releases with collaborative and self-managing teams.

Six Sigma: It aims to improve quality by reducing the number of errors in a process by identifying what is not working and then removing it from the process.

Case Studies

Ivey Business Journal

A three-year cross-industry study by Ivey business journal explained how poor business strategy, inappropriate communication or damaged working relationships between partners account for 94 percent of all broken and failed alliances. On their own, poor or damaged working relationships account for 52 percent of all broken alliances.

There are several reasons due to which an alliance is broken. Issues like impersonal problems, failure of team members communicating, high attrition rates, and most importantly the failure to reach a milestone.

When an alliance is recognized as broken, there are many critical tasks to perform and many separate decisions to be made. Partners require to diagnose why the alliance has broken down, examine and interpret the existing obstacles, disputes or tensions, and create a specific procedure to master these problems. They must furnish themselves to uphold a long-term relationship.

To relaunch your relationship with your client a three-step process can be followed:

Audit the relationship diagnosing the root causes

The partnership can succeed only if both organizations are fully persuaded that the alliance is the most effective means to meet their goals.

OEM Profitability and Supplier Relations - which is based in part on data gathered over the past 13 years from the annual Working Relations Index Study published by consultancy Planning Perspectives - found the better the relationship an automotive manufacturer has with its suppliers, the greater its profits are.

It explained the relationship “quantifies the economic value of suppliers’. This includes a supplier sharing new technology, providing the best team to support to the manufacturer, and providing support that goes beyond the supplier's contractual obligation.

The report added the research “establishes the fact that the economic value of the suppliers’ non-price benefits can greatly exceed the economic benefit realized from suppliers’ price concessions”. On average, this can be up to four to five times greater, according to the research.

Determine what your business and shareholders need first. If it’s short-term financial gains, then customer loyalty should not be a stated goal. Client seeks relationships, with their vendor. They want a place to be heard, a place to be appreciated and a place to connect.

At Opensense Labs, we use social technologies and services that allow us to take relationships with customers to higher levels. Connecting with customers’ personal values helps in placing ahead of the competition in winning the hearts and minds of your customers.

This site has been partially supported by NSF Grant 07-08437. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the contributors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.